Externality 7b/? (2018-01-21)

She is none too gently herded into the classroom after the healing session, left to wait along with the rest of her classmates who have finished before her or who had minimal injuries.

In the light of day and the civilizing influence of four walls and a ceiling, the last few hours of the exam seems less like a thrilling midnight battle and more like a bunch of children causing a ruckus. A skirmish at best rather than the high stakes fight it had seemed at the time.

She can feel a different, embarrassed kind of fever flush across her face.

Tetsuki refuses to meet anyone’s gaze and goes to sit over in the corner that most everyone else seems to be avoiding. That it’s nowhere near her usual seat means nothing.

Naruto Uzumaki grins at her.

She gives a quick, sheepish smile in return.

But it’s a tense couple of minutes as more and more classmates are brought in–everyone silent and heavy and waiting for the other shoe to fall–before finally Yanagi-sensei and Hinoura-sensei enter with displeased and unimpressed expressions.

Tetsuki glowers at him–if the situation was anyone’s fault, it was his!

She holds onto that righteous anger throughout Yanagi-sensei’s lecture, through the assessment of her classmates, lining up one by one and presenting their tokens or lack thereof…

… until he gets to the first student who ought to have had an armband and has nothing instead.

“Report,” Yanagi-sensei says, but instead of standing up at attention and dutifully relaying everything that happened in the past three days, that classmate faces the ground and mutters something unintelligible.

Even in the tense atmosphere, some of the other students laugh.

“Are you not a future shinobi of Konoha?” Yanagi-sensei asks. He is fond of rhetorical questions, giving a student just enough rope to hang themselves with.

There is more laughter, but with a distinctly nervous tinge.

“I said, report.”

“Rock Lee took it from me,” their classmate says finally, grit out through clenched teeth.

Yeah, Tetsuki thinks to herself, she wouldn’t want to admit getting beat up by the class dead last either.